


Riding in Cars with Demons

by equestrianstatue



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, POV Third Person Omniscient (Car)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 11:30:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19272385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: “Careful of the upholstery,” Crowley said, immediately, and in the same voice he used to announce the passage of a condemned soul into hell.





	Riding in Cars with Demons

Crowley’s 1926 Bentley had run a surprising length of the gamut of human experience, considering it was a car. In the course of 90-odd years, it had been praised to the Heavens, damned to Hell, cared for, shouted at, convinced to do some things it didn’t want to, prevented from doing some things it _did_ want to, set on fire, exploded, and fully reconstructed by a penitent Antichrist. Not all of this fell strictly into the usual gamut of human experience. But never having been a human, or indeed been owned by a human, the car had a necessarily limited understanding of what usual was.

The car was parked a short way from a gentle, winding, chalk-hilled track, somewhere in the downlands of the Green Belt. The view, while not spectacular, involved enough grass and woodland to be a pleasant enough change from central London. The sun, begrudgingly admitting that it was, in fact, August, was out.

What was happening now had never happened to the car before.

Crowley was in the back seat of the car. His sunglasses had gone to catch up with some old friends in the glove compartment. His hair, wilting a little in the heat, flopped forward onto his forehead. He had one hand braced against the top of the seat’s burgundy leather backrest, and the other was curled against one side of Aziraphale’s face. Aziraphale was also in the back seat of the car. But for the Bentley, which was used to only needing to account for Crowley, this piece of information came very much at this point on the list.

Neither Aziraphale or Crowley had said anything for far longer than was usual when they were in the car.

“Mmph,” Crowley did say, eventually, pulling his mouth away from Aziraphale’s, where it had been in some way involved. His hand, which had been slipping on the leather, was re-adjusted. His knee, balanced on the seat in between Aziraphale’s legs, was re-adjusted too.

Aziraphale himself, who was propped up against one of the car’s back windows— one leg bent upwards on the seat and one splayed out in the other direction, his foot braced on the floor— squirmed around in response to this. “Ow,” he said, as he wedged his back against the door hinge.

“Oh— shift that way. There.”

“Ah, like— _ow_.” The funny bone of Aziraphale’s elbow— so-called because God had included it in the human body as a private joke during an early design spec, and then completely forgotten to take it out— banged off the same door hinge.

“Whoops,” said Crowley.

“Don’t know why we couldn’t have just— waited til we got back,” Aziraphale said, although halfway through the sentence Crowley pressed his mouth against Aziraphale’s neck, and he sounded less annoyed after that.

“Would that,” said Crowley, in a low murmur seemingly directed to the neck, “have been as much fun?”

“Yes?” said Aziraphale. “Of course it would. It’s always fun.”

“Shut up,” growled Crowley. “That’s very— nice. Don’t distract me. I’m trying to ravish you.”

“Well, get on with it, then.”

“ _Get on with it, then,_ ” Crowley muttered. “You could be a bit more enthusiastic.”

“I would say that’s rather unambiguously enthusiastic.”

“You could tell your face.”

“All right,” said Aziraphale. One corner of his mouth lifting, he slipped a finger underneath Crowley’s chin, traced the jut of his Adam’s apple, and then leaned forward to kiss him again.

This seemed to go down well. Crowley, making a small and acquiescent sort of noise, kissed him back quite slowly and quite gently. Then, with one hand at the back of Aziraphale’s neck, and one of Aziraphale’s hands in his hair, he kissed him back less gently.

Before long Aziraphale had slipped far enough down in the seat to be closer to reclining than not, although the confines of space meant that his knee was sticking up even higher in the air, and his shoulders were bunched against the car’s interior panelling. He hadn’t complained about this. Presumably unrelatedly, Crowley, who had followed him down, had removed Aziraphale’s bow tie— which was now sitting quietly in the passenger seat with both of their waistcoats and jackets, minding its own business— and was undoing the buttons of Aziraphale’s shirt, pressing his tongue carefully against each uncovered inch of skin.

“You could,“ Aziraphale said, “just get rid of all this— a bit quicker— ”

“I could,” Crowley agreed. “ _You_ could. Don’t see you doing it.”

“You’re distracting me.”

“Am I? How terribly rude of— oh.”

Aziraphale’s shirt, which was still technically being worn by Aziraphale’s body, although barely, was now the rest of the way open. It also seemed to have ridden up at the back. His trousers and underwear had made themselves conveniently scarce. But aside from the snake-buckled belt, which was now coiled neatly on the passenger seat on top of the waistcoats, Crowley remained otherwise dressed.

“Well,” Crowley said. “Some of the way there.”

Aziraphale, whose fingers were now resting under the hem of Crowley’s top, said, apparently in explanation, “Who told thee that thou wast naked, et cetera?” When this didn’t seem to do the trick, he said, “Well, I thought, if you want this to be fun, which for you presumably means transgressional in some way, one might as well commit the original sin of covering one’s nakedness.” Crowley blinked at him. Aziraphale said, “I like it when you keep most of your clothes on.”

“Right,” said Crowley, his voice a bit tight.

Aziraphale’s fingers had begun to wander along the waistband of Crowley’s trousers, and to press interestedly against the fly. Crowley didn’t so much shiver as— wriggle. Taking advantage of Aziraphale having recently discovered that he wast naked, he dipped his head to the inside of Aziraphale’s thigh, where he pressed his mouth. Aziraphale, spurred abruptly into movement, slipped even further down the seat. “Ow,” he said, again.

“ _What_?”

“Sorry, it’s just— it’s very warm in here, and I think I’m a bit— stuck to the seat— ”

“Careful of the upholstery,” Crowley said, immediately, and in the same voice he used to announce the passage of a condemned soul into hell.

“Careful of the upholstery?” repeated Aziraphale, frowning. “You can’t very well entrap me into being ravished in the back of your car and then spring ‘Don’t touch the upholstery’ on me.”

“I didn’t say you can’t touch it. Just— don’t damage it.”

“What counts as damage? Crowley, I’m not going to spend the next five minutes so worried about defiling your car that I miss the whole thing.”

“You weren’t entrapped,” said Crowley, and then, pulling a face, “Five minutes?”

Aziraphale shrugged, or made an abortive movement that, if he hadn’t been crammed into such a small corner, might have dreamt of being a shrug. “My back is only going to take this for so long. That foot’s getting pins and needles. And you said we were driving out for a picnic.”

“We did have a picnic!” said Crowley, defensively.

“Yes, and it was very nice!”

“I know!”

Aziraphale waved his hand vaguely along the length of the back seat. “You can just miracle everything clean afterwards.”

“It wouldn’t be the same,” Crowley muttered. “I’d know.”

“It seems prudent to remind you, again, that this was entirely your idea.”

Crowley scowled. “Yes, and it was brilliant,” he said, still scowling. He turned back to the inside of Aziraphale’s leg, where he bit him, not hard, and seemingly as more of a punctuation mark than anything else. Aziraphale, who liked punctuation, twitched.

“Just— stay still and stop arguing,” Crowley said, to Aziraphale’s knee. Then he dragged his tongue determinedly down Aziraphale’s leg, paused only briefly to worm it into the crease at the top of Aziraphale's thigh, and licked a single-minded stripe along Aziraphale’s not at all uninterested cock.

“Yes, all right,” said Aziraphale, “I can— do that.”

He could, to a degree, in that he stayed relatively still, and didn’t argue with anything Crowley was doing out loud. However, as a heavenly being fundamentally in opposition to everything Crowley stood for (and lay down for), Aziraphale’s mere existence could have been interpreted as a continued argument against demonic forces. But since nobody who had ever tried to explain the relationship between angelic and demonic forces had considered the effects of the forces being temporarily deployed in this manner, the point was undetermined.

Crowley, edging forward in order to give his demonic forces slightly more freedom of movement, rested one hand on the roundedness of Aziraphale’s hip, making fleeting, pale impressions in his skin. His other hand slipped round to the narrow, warm gap between Aziraphale’s body and the body of the car, where it pressed against the base of his spine. Aziraphale, sighing, pushed his hips infinitesimally forwards, and Crowley’s hand wandered upwards as his tongue wandered down. His fingers ran slowly and delicately along the dips of Aziraphale’s backbone, up to the curve of his shoulder blades.

It was hard to determine the exact order of events that immediately followed. Aziraphale and Crowley were in quite different positions, Aziraphale leaning forward, body curled downward and braced over Crowley, who had been thrown back into the seat in the opposite direction. But first, or afterwards, there had been a cracking sound like an unfurling horsewhip— something that the Bentley, despite having been invented in order to avoid getting involved with horses at all, seemed to retain in an odd sort of generational memory. There had also been another sound that was more like a paper bag filled with air being crushed, and a brief flash of very bright cold light. Also, the car was absolutely full of feathers.

Had the Bentley possessed such a thing as a car alarm— generally understood to be an invention designed to alert humans to their cars being broken into, but more accurately an interface that allowed cars to express their own sense of alarm— this would have been the time to use it. But it hadn’t been built with one, and Crowley had never really needed to imagine one, because if anyone had ever tried to steal his car, they would have found the steering wheel excruciatingly hot, the accelerator stuck, and a sudden image behind their eyes of their favourite local takeaway going up in flames.

However, the windscreen wipers turned themselves on, moving at a slightly more frantic pace than usual.

“What the fuck!” Crowley was saying.

“Oh, my goodness— ”

“What have you done that for?”

“I didn’t do anything!”

Crowley gestured, in the very small amount of space available for him to do so, at the enormous pair of wings that were taking up all of the rest of the space. “You clearly just have!”

“ _You_ did that!”

“I what?”

“It must have been something you did.”

“What, you’ve got an _on-switch_? Press here, wings expand?”

“I don’t know! Maybe! One doesn’t press oneself very often.”

“That has _never_ happened before.”

“Well,” huffed Aziraphale, the tip of one wing clattering against the back window, “maybe it’s because I’m under stress.”

“Why would you be under stress?”

“Oh, I don’t know, because if I scratch one inch of paintwork you’re not going to speak to me for twenty years— ”

“Why aren’t you putting them away?!”

“I’m _trying_.”

Crowley pushed himself further into the other corner of the back seat, while Aziraphale folded the white expanse of wings close to his body. He closed his eyes. After a moment— during which a sense of benevolence and peace flooded the car, which was ignored by everyone in it— there was a soft popping sound, and the space around them suddenly became much emptier. A few remaining white feathers drifted unhurriedly into the footwell.

“This,” said Crowley, spitting a feather out of his mouth, “is not sexy! This is not at all sexy.”

“Oh, for G— ”

Crowley glared at the windscreen wipers. “Stop that,” he said, and they did.

“— _your_ brilliant idea,” Aziraphale finished muttering.

Crowley, pushing himself slightly too viciously out of the corner of the seat, immediately hit his head on the roof of the car. He ducked down again, hissing, his shoulders tensing into a curve.

“Don’t get yours out,” Aziraphale said. “You’ll take the roof off.”

“ _Right_ ,” Crowley said. “Let’s go home.”

Aziraphale’s face softened. “Oh, don’t be cross.”

“I’m a demon,” said Crowley, his mouth a hard, thin line. “I’m always cross.”

This wasn’t true. Crowley hadn’t been cross for at least half an hour before they’d got into the car. Half an hour beforehand was when he’d discovered that a wasp had drowned in his Chablis. Having invented wasps, Crowley had mainly been cross about the fact that he had undeniably played himself.

Aziraphale said, “We don’t have to go home _straight_ away. You could just kiss me for a bit longer. That would be nice.”

The line of Crowley’s mouth seemed to be fighting with itself to stay quite so hard and thin.

“And then we can go to yours, if you like. A whole bed! I won’t even try to cheer up the plants while you’re not listening. I promise.” 

“Don’t know why you refuse to get a bed,” Crowley mumbled. “That sofa is not fit for purpose.” 

“I think you may have repurposed it. And anyway, you’re the one who’s so interested in _not_ being in a bed, for some reason.”

Crowley’s eyes flickered over Aziraphale, who was now sitting up beside him. “Ripped your shirt up,” he said, lifting a strip of light-blue cotton between two of his fingers, where Aziraphale’s shirt had failed to get out of the way of his wings.

“Yes, well, I do think _I_ got more of a shock, overall.”

“Going to put it back together?”

“When we head off. Give me a moment.”

Curling the strip around his finger, Crowley leaned inwards, his mouth hovering against Aziraphale’s cheek. “Good,” he said, and tugged sharply, so that there was a low, rending sound, and the cotton came away in his hand. “Five minutes?”

The presence of a mint condition, scratch-free, highly-polished 1926 Bentley— which was not so much as-new as somehow-better-than-new— didn’t entirely escape Sunday afternoon’s attention. It sat quietly overlooking the long, rolling dip of grassland for a little while longer, and once or twice another car even drove past it. At least one of the other cars’ motorists was impressed enough to remark on never having seen it up here before, and to wonder where its owner was, and whether they’d be doing the London to Brighton this year. But by this point the Bentley had taken it upon itself to develop tinted windows, and the motorist never found out.

**Author's Note:**

> The car used in the show is actually from the 1930s, but I’ve assumed that Crowley helped speed up the manufacturing process and managed to get hold of one a few years early. I am absolutely sure nobody cares enough about this to validate how long I spent weighing up what year to describe this car as being from.
> 
> The London to Brighton Veteran Car Run is the oldest motoring event in the world, originally founded to celebrate the UK road speed limit being raised from 4 mph to a breathtaking 14 mph. It includes a stop, presumably at Crowley’s behest, in Crawley.
> 
> If you enjoyed this story, you can also reblog it [on tumblr](https://justlikeeddie.tumblr.com/post/185690076057/riding-in-cars-with-demons-equestrianstatue)!


End file.
